Just a little memory hook: When a Xen DomU hangs at “Checking for hardware changes”, it is probably due to a dead xenconsoled process on the Dom0. This happens from time to time but should immediately fix the hanging DomUs.

Mounting images that contain only one partition is rather easy. But how to mount image with multiple partitions? kpartx is the solution! You can list all partitions within the image with kpartx can be used to create maps from the block devices And those maps can be mounted as usual

If the Dom0’s kernel is built with pciback as a module (grep CONFIG_XEN_PCIDEV_BACKEND /boot/config-`uname -r`), using the kernel command-line parameter pciback.hide won’t work. There is of course more than solution how you can assign hardware to a domU, but the probably easiest one is to to pass the hide parameter to the pciback module in /etc/modprobe.conf: The xensouce mailing list… Read more »

Per default, CentOS 5.3 saves a domU’s state when the hypervisor is shut down. In principle this a nice behaviour: The domU will restore its state automagically when the hypervisor comes up again and just continue working. But there are some services (e.g. mldonkey) that don’t like to be restored and refuse to work (i.e. keep in a blocked state… Read more »

This is an easy one: You just append zeros at the end of the corresponding image file (here 1GB): You may want to shutdown your domU before changing its image file. After appending the zeros, you can restart the domain and expand its filesystem.

First, we have to delete our current partition and create a bigger one (don’t be afraid, no data will be lost): Type m to get a list of all commands: Let’s print out the partition table and look for the ext3 partition, we want to enlarge (it’s easy here, there is just one partition): Now we delete the old partition… Read more »